Transcript of Adam Carolla on California's Collapse: Fires, Failed Leadership, and Gyno-Fascism

Adam, great to meet you. Thanks for being here on the All In podcast. My pleasure. Yeah, this is awesome for me. I'm a big fan. I grew up in LA. I listened to Loveline on K-Rock as a teenager, pre-Internet, before the Internet really took off. The content you and Dr. Drew put out on Love Line on drugs, sex, human psychology. This was stuff that didn't exist in our everyday lives and the discourse that you guys had. It was really expansive for folks, at least in my cohort growing up in LA. We learned a lot. I want to thank you for that. I think you've pioneered an important corner of the world of content and media for a long time. So thanks for that. You've lived in LA for a long time, right?

Yeah, a whole life.

And so we I thought this would be a great conversation to have on the one year anniversary of the Palisades fire, because we know that you've been an outspoken voice on the actions and the reactions to the Palisades fire. And while we're talking, we can also talk broadly about LA, about California, about the US, us and where things are headed. Every business has an ambition. Paypal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours. With access to business loans so you can expand and reach hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide, and your customers can pay all the ways they want today with PayPal, Venmo, PayLater, and all major cards so you can focus on the future. When you need a partner trusted by millions, there's one platform for all business, PayPal Open. Grow today at paypalopen. Com. Let's just do a quick recap. So the Palisades fire a year ago destroyed 6,837 structures, including about 5,000 homes. And as of November, 2025, only one home has been rebuilt. Can you just give us your view on what's gone on since the fire? Why has this been such a slow process? And why have all of the promises that were made in the days and weeks after the fire forgotten about?

Well, I'm uniquely qualified to address this subject because I live in Malibu, and I was physically there on sunset the morning the fire started. I literally walked out of the Equinox gym and I looked up Sunset Boulevard up in the mountains, and I saw smoke. It was 9: 45 in the morning. I was like, Live there, was evacuated that night, but also have a background in construction, building, permitting the city, regulation, that stuff. It's a subject that I'm pretty passionate about. I think it leads into a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California and How come there's no affordable housing and how come when they build homeless units that are 400 square feet, they're $900,000 a unit and so on and so forth. It would be nice to use this as a stepping stone to that conversation organization. I've lived in California my whole life, and I was in construction my whole life. Then when I got into show business later, all I did was use the show business money to on more building projects. So I never got away from being on a job site. It just happened to be my own home versus other people's homes.

And of course, as an owner builder, was always having to deal with permits in the city and so I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive and actually did more harm than good. It dissuaded a lot of people from building. A lot of people went, I don't want to deal with the city. When you talk to fast food franchises, they'll go, I'll open a store in any city, but I'm not going to do Los Angeles. It's too much. It becomes too much work. Then either people bootleg things or they don't start their project at all. Because if you go through the normal channels, which is engineering and then plan check and permitting and approvals and all that, it's not only really expensive, but it's super time consuming. It basically convinces you to scrub the project. I was friends with Suzanne Somers and her husband, Alan Hamel, and they I'm still friends with Alan. Obviously, Susan passed recently. They're a great couple, and they love Malibu. They used to come out and stay at the Malibu in and go out to dinner with me. They live in Palm Springs. I said, Well, you love Malibu so much.

I don't get why you don't live in Malibu. They said, Oh, we lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down. That was probably 20 years ago. Then when we wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome and there was so much regulation. These are people in their early '70s, late '60s. They don't have 11 years to rebuild a house. They're in the twilight part. They're in the retirement years. At a certain point, Alan Hamble just said, I couldn't deal with the Coastal Commission anymore. It's his property. He just wanted to rebuild a slightly different structure. Some talk about a carport and whether he needed close parking, whatever. Eventually, they just packed up and they went to Palm Springs and they built a house there. That's essentially what it does. It dissuades a lot of people from rebuilding. I was displaced in the wee hours of the fire that night. I found myself at 2: 00, probably 4: 00 AM just walking into a random hotel in Burbank, California, and trying to check in at 4: 00 in the morning. I always remember it because the person behind the desk wasn't there.

I asked the guy who was buffing the floor, and they said, She's at lunch. I thought, It's 4: 00 in the morning, meaning she's in the back room eating a sandwich, but you can wait a half hour. Anyway, we got checked in. The following morning, I got up to come back to the studio, but the power was out. The wind had broken the telephone poles in my Burbank studio, and so the power was all out. I said, Well, should we run a best of or something, or should I just... Let's just sit down here in the hotel room. I'm going to move this table and move that chair, and I'll just do an emergency broadcast from the hotel room. In that broadcast, the following morning after the fire, I said, Do not expect any rebuilding. You guys have no idea what the permitting process is. You have no idea how much red tape there is in regulation. Oh, they're going to talk some story about expediting things and making things easier and faster and so on and so forth. It is not going to happen. This is Los Angeles. Karen Bass is the mayor. There will be nothing rebuilt.

I guarantee you that. Good luck pulling a permit. Then, by the way, all you asswipes that vote Democrat every year, when you don't get your permit, maybe you should think about a different direction politically. That's what I said eight hours after the fire, and it's been a year. I'm in Malibu. There's nothing rebuilt in Malibu.

Can you just help diagnose the source of the problem? Is it cronyism, corruption, by some union or labor group or contractors that are trying to up the cost of things? Is it an incompetency or is there a good motivation to save the planet and save the environment and slow things down? What is behind the overregulation and the red tape, which is not just inherent in LA, it's obviously a California problem. And across the United States, I've got my view on this. I'd love to hear your view on where this is coming from. What's the origin of this?

I don't think any of it is connected to unions or builders or contractors or engineers or any of that. I don't think they want any of it. I live in that world. I talk to these people, they roll their eyes, they hate it. It makes their job much harder. I don't think it's a New York Mafia will handle the garbage situation. What I'm starting to learn is basically what people are calling gynofascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. It's safety Uber Alice, and the second thing is environment Uber Alice. Everything they do is under the umbrella of safety. They get a lot of applause and accolades for making things safer, but what they don't realize is they grind things to a halt. Shutting schools down for COVID may be the safest thing to do, but you damage kids. You cause a lot of collateral damage. It was never dangerous to healthy young kids in the first place, and you should have approached it much differently. But what did you do? You said, Shut the schools, shut the churches, shut the small businesses, mask up. You want full safety.

Barbara Farrar, who's in charge of this, and then there was Mayor Bass, although at the time it was Mayor Pete. I'll think of his name in a second. The guy got shipped off to India. But mostly female city council who never stopped talking about safety. Yeah, it was Garcetti.

Garcetti, yeah.

When they They hide behind the shield of safety because it makes them sound noble. But it's essentially like saying, Look, wouldn't your car be safer if it had a full NASCAR-style roll cage in it? And you go, I guess. And what about a fire suppression system? Okay. And then how about a fuel cell with a bladder in it, that a ballistic material in it versus a gas tank? Don't you think that'd be safe? Yeah, but the Prius is going to be $150,000, and no one We can afford one now. Yeah, but it'd be safe. So they hide behind this safety BS. It's mostly women who buy into it, just like we scared the moms during COVID. And then they make all the rules. The rules are always more and it's always safer. Also people go along with it. They go, Look, if a caisson is 10 feet deep into the ground with number 4 rebar, wouldn't it be safer to have it be 20 feet in the ground with number 6 rebar? It's like, It would be, but you just added 70% to the cost of the caisson. That's how they think.

Because their job, the job of That individual sitting in that role, whether it's a local state or federal government agency, is to increase safety. Their job is not to think about the second and third order effects on the economy, on the affordability, on the ability to move quickly, on all the other factors that the individual citizen and the businesses in the community then have to deal with. That's never what they're tasked with. They have a very simple uniform statement, which is, Hey, make things safe. You're the regulatory body that oversees safety and oversees that we're not going to have a fire. This is like, I don't know if you followed this autonomous vehicle stuff in California, but for every million miles, autonomous vehicles reduce fatalities by 95%. But if there's one autonomous vehicle that crashes once, everyone shuts that entire program down and says, Wait a second, we've got robots killing people. We can't let that happen. We have to stop robots from killing people, versus looking at the second order and third order effect, which is significant reduction in overall fatalities, improvement in safety, and so on. That seems to be the organizational problem, right?

Well, it's like when you have these foules like Bill De Blasio saying, If one person dies, that's one person too many. Whenever you hear that, you have to go, This person's a dope. And they shouldn't be in a leadership position because you can't be in a leadership position. You can't be a general in the army, and you can't be the mayor of a town and announce if one person died. By the way, eight people died of fentanyl on the street in the time it took you to make that one pompous statement. So shut up and start being practical.

Totally. I saw this in San Francisco when they gave away needles, and then they created this safe space for people to do fentanyl and do drugs and shoot up by giving them free needles and saying, You can do it here. So they could reduce the transmission of HIV and other diseases that are transmitted via needle. And it's like, Well, what percentage of people do you think are now going to have a higher proclivity to do fentanyl and do these drugs? That's going to create so many more fatalities than the HIV ever would have. It's just very thoughtless in the overall view. I do remember when the COVID pandemic first began, in one of the first episodes we did of this show, I specifically talked about the lack of leadership in being able to synthesize multiple data streams, which is what a leader's job is, is to see the whole field and to make a decision on how do we win the game or how do we win the war, versus listen to the one person that's the safety commissioner that says, This is how you save lives, but thinking through the second and third order effects of what would happen to kids if you kept them out of school for six months, what would happen to the economy if you shut down in businesses.

But the lack of synthesis, the lack of true leadership in these institutions is what makes things so difficult.

Well, also the corruption of being in the pockets of the school board union and the teacher's union. I mean, first off, they hire some dumb witch named Barbara Farrer, who's not even a doctor, and she just makes the declaration to shut everything down because that's the safest thing. Then the school teachers who aren't heroes and don't feel like working decide they'd rather work from home than get dressed and go into school. Then they just tell Gavin Newsom, who they funnel their money to and get elected every year, do our bidding. He's a coward, and so he does that. And then at some point, Rochelle Walinski, the CDC, announces they should open schools, but that gets shut down really quickly by the school unions, and then she announces that she was not speaking officially. That was just her opinion off the record. And you have a whole bunch of people controlled by teachers unions.

Yeah. Well, so is there a solution?

Well, first off, teachers unions, and any union, shouldn't be in charge of electing people. They should be out of it completely.

They shouldn't be able to give money to candidates is what you're saying.

No. But by the way, the LA Times shouldn't announce an endorsement every year because now I don't believe you when you write the crappy article about the guy you didn't endorse and you write the glowing article about Kamala Harris. You've made a fool of yourself by announcing. It's like an umpire to baseball game, endorsing the LA, the Dodgers, right? Don't make an announcement, Call Balls and Strikes. New York Times, LA Times, Call Balls and Strikes. Don't announce you're for the diamondbacks.

Right. Before we get back to the unions, I just want to hit on this point on media. Why has media gone this way? Because has this become this bias, a reaction to technology? I've got this view that you It used to be that the media, the newspapers, the radio, the television stations and networks, controlled access to information because they were the aggregators of information and then disseminators of that information to the population. When the internet came along, suddenly all of the information, pure data, just reporting, became ubiquitous. We see this all over the place. The weather is, you can just look it up. You don't need to go to a news station to get the weather. You don't need to go to the news station to get the sports scores. You don't need to go to the news station to get all the events and happenings in the world. So newspapers, magazines, television stations, networks had to become something else. Is that what happened? Did they evolve, do you think, in reaction to the Internet?

I think there's some of that. Here is the way I've sussed it out, and it'll be the next subject that I think people will be talking about coming up. I brought up gynofascism earlier. Men and women are different, and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that, but we are. The newsrooms were a very short period of time ago, 15, 20 years ago, it would be 12% female, or the news outlets or CBS, NBC, New York Times, whatever, had a minority of women, college campuses. When they bring all the presidents of these colleges up in front of Congress, they're all women. It's not like they went, We need to talk to only women presidents of prestigious colleges. We just go, Give me the presidents. Every time there's a presser, I think this just happened at Brown with the shooting, but it happened in Congress with Harvard and so on and so forth. It's all women in these positions. Now, women aren't flawed, and there's nothing wrong with them. But If you said this, if you said, My son is going to play a Little League game and we need an umpire, and my son's going to be pitching, who do you think could call balls and strikes with less emotion, the father or the mother.

I think it's understood that the mother would be protecting her son and might call a couple of balls that went into the dirt a strike. They're just more likely to pick aside, team up, and then root for. If you have now 57% women running the colleges or 57% and the women at the New York Times or the LA Times. Well, then they're going to pick aside, and they're going to say, We like Joe Biden, and we hate Donald Trump. Then what articles are we going to print? Well, those are the articles we're going to get print. When Senator Cotton wants to come up with an op-ed about bringing the National Guard in to stop Black Lives Matter writers or whatever it is, Antifa writers, we'll just all get together and get the editor fired, and we'll take over that way. It's much more of an emotional process. And by the way, that's why they're better being moms, because you're to your son, rub some dirt on it, you'll be fine. And she's, Oh, come here. Let me take care of you. That's what happened with COVID, by the way. They got all the moms. They pitch it all to the moms.

They get the mom's heads polluted with all the nonsense and then their moms make... They call the shots at the house. So you come home- Same with vaccines, same with organic food movements.

By the way, this is an actual fact. Fact that the marketing campaigns around all of those categories are directed specifically at moms because that's where you're ultimately going to drive the action.

My kids were, I don't know, 14. My son was 14 when he got vaccinated. I didn't want him to get vaccinated. He was a healthy, young guy with no pre-existing conditions. My wife took him to get vaccinated because she's watching the TV. I'm out at work. That's what's happening. If you want to know what's happening in the LA City Council or the LA Times or the New York Times. So mainstream media got an influx of estrogen, and now there's many more women. And then you have Leslie Stahl sitting in front of Donald Trump going, Sir, sir, sir, no one can prove the Hunter Biden lap. Sir, no one can prove. Well, what is she doing? She's not being a reporter at that point. A reporter would say, Do you have some evidence of the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop? I'm all ears. What do you got? They wouldn't be going, Sir, sir, sir. That's a woman arguing with someone she hates.

What do you think Megan Kelly and Barry Weiss would say to your take?

I'm very friendly with both of them. I just did Barry's show in Austin a couple of months ago, and I did Megan's show outside of Atlanta several weeks I'll go on a limb and say that they both adore me, and I adore them as well. Now, here's the caveat.

When you cast a gender assessment like that, wide net like that, the exceptions obviously discredit the rule that you're stating, but are you saying that there are exceptions in the sense?

Oh, yes. Megan Kelly has the brain of a cage fighter. She is more masculine than any dude I know in how she thinks. Of course, there's Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. There are many women, historically and Currently, you just brought up two of them who don't have that issue. By the way, there's Gavin Newsom who crosses his legs like he's trying to dislocate his hip. That guy thinks like a woman. They're both sides. You know what I mean? They can work both ways. There's plenty of men who have that thinking process, and then there's women who think the other way. It's basically It's not biological per se? Not per se, but in general, if you just said, Look, if you did my thought experiment, the mom has their 10-year-old son pitching a Little League game, could she call a as if it was someone else's son on that mount? The answer is, I don't really think so in general. Megan Kelly could. I think she could. But I don't think most moms could. Could most dads? Yes, most dads could, but not all of them. Gavin Newsom couldn't. See what I'm saying? Barry Weiss could. It's one of those.

But when you take the newsroom and you go from 12% to 57%, and every one of you hates Trump with a blind rage, then what articles are going to come out of your publication? Oh, he was pissing on the grave of the unknown soldier, an anonymous source says. It's going to corrupt that, and then you're going to get in accuracy, and then you're going to get burned. That's what happened to them, and they discredited themselves.

There was a recent article. It was a long-form essay. The guy that's a writer and he couldn't get a job, and everyone in Hollywood wouldn't hire him, Jacob Savage. Is this part of the evolution of woke ideologies, as they're called, and that the permeation of those ideologies into media institutions seems to be a big part of the driver. Is that where this is coming from?

A lot of it is that. It's a pie in the sky. If you want to break down feminine versus male, you get Trump, who thinks like five dudes, and he's a builder, a commercial builder. I'll circle back and answer this. Then you get Karen Bass, who's steeped in the Chick tank and very into the gynofascism world, and she's a procedural person. She never builds anything or does anything. Then you have these two come a year ago after the fire, and Trump's chomping at the bit. He's going, People should be cleaning and clearing their own parcels tonight. They should be doing it right now. Let them back in.

Let them back in.

Then you have her going, But safely, but safely, but safely. She's talking about safety. He's talking about speed. He wants the project done. She wants it done safely, and she's going to regulate it to the point where it can't be done in any timely manner. Her thought is process, safety, safety, process. His is damn the torpedoes. Then he leaves and they feed him a bunch of crap about, Oh, yeah, we're going to expedite everything. And a year later, there's nothing because they don't care. It's not what they want to do, and it's not what they're interested in. They're process safety people. She wants to be in Ghana dancing is where she to be wearing ceremonial headgarb. All right, so as far as your question about the woke world, here's what's happening with that in the story you referenced about the white writer who can't get on to the writing staff. I live in Hollywood. I understand those people. I can't tell you the amount of times guys had projects and stuff and just went, Well, it's not going anywhere because I'm middle-aged white guy. By the way, I also know guys who run writers rooms for successful sitcoms that a few years ago were forced like, Hey, you don't have any young Latina women on this, on your writing staff.

And they go, Well, no young Latina women. They've not submitted anything funny. We got old Jews here. And they go, Well, you better hire a couple of young Latinos to get... And then the guys just babysit them for six months when they don't get anything on the air. They just get paid, and they'll tell me. They'll just go, Yeah, she's not funny. She shouldn't be here. I wish she did get stuff on the air, but her stuff's not any good. Now you take your writing staff of 10, but you really only have eight Because you hired two or three people that were not qualified to be there. Here's what I'm saying. In this never-ending quest to help people of color and women and the LGBT community and have everyone have a seat at the table because we live in a society that's systemically racist, I know when you make the decree, you go, We're looking to help young people and women of color and the LGBT. But at a certain point, you can say you're a huge Stealers fan, but at some point, you have to hate the Ravens. You can't just go, I love the Stealers, and I have no thoughts about the Ravens.

You hate the Ravens. They're your arch nemesis. They could beat your Stealers. Basically, you can't just help people of color without a certain point hurting white males who are the Ravens, essentially, in this equation. It's not going to work. You have to go, Well, shouldn't UCLA be open to more people of color? And you go, Okay, all right. But there's not infinite amount of space at UCLA. It's finite. So eventually, we're going to have to toss a couple of Asians out who had higher test scores to make room for the people you want on campus. So no, there is no just helping one group. There has to be a couple of funny middle-aged white guys who aren't employed because you made room for the Latina chics.

So favoring one group, just to summarize, always has discrimination against another group if you have a limited set of spots, right?

Yeah. Look, it could be a lifeboat on the Titanic, and then you just go women and children first. All right. Well, sorry, middle-aged white guy. You're out.

So have you seen this in Hollywood? And maybe just to come back to the conversation we're having a minute ago, have you seen this in Hollywood in both the writers rooms, but also director's suites in production houses? The Academy of Motion, Picture, Arts, and Sciences in 2021 passed their inclusion rules that in order to be eligible for an Oscar, there are now rules around the race, the ethnicity, the sexual orientation, or the disability of individuals in every role in order for you to be qualified for an Oscar for that role. As all of these rules and systems have rolled out in Hollywood, has that changed the culture of America? Because Hollywood creates a lot of culture.

Well, they It damages the product, that's for sure, because if you're looking for a meritocracy and if you said, All right, the Super Bowl is here, and it turns out all 11 players on the defensive side of the ball are black and then someone goes, There needs to be a Jew in there, and there needs to be a couple of women and a few Asians, it's going to hurt the level of play. Of course, All the DEI hires will hurt because Kamala Harris is a DEI hire. Now, you go, Well, Adam, what do you talk about? Look, Joe Biden said it. He said, I want a woman of color. All right. So whether it's the fire chief or whether it's the vice president of the United States, if you're going to limit your pool to women of color, there's going to be a lot. It could be fire chiefs It could be vice presidents, and it could be airline pilots. Either way, if you're going to limit that pool or guys who put on stucco, either way, if you limit your pool of roofers to women of color, you're going to have a hard time finding a qualified roofer, and you're going to have to wait a while.

The product is going to suffer, number one. Number two, the part where you grow up and see people who look like being James Bond or being the President of the United States and that stuff. I would say 40 years ago was a pretty noble pursuit. I don't think it's necessary today. All the race hustlers act like it's 1959. They never admit that we had a Black President for two terms and the most celebrated people in our society. I don't know if it's Oprah or LeBron James or Michelle Obama. They love women. They love people of color. Every white kid grows up wanting to be Michael Jordan. We're past that point.

Do you think that this is what is now going to be the core driver of politics in this next cycle? We're going into a pretty crazy 2026. There's this big rise in socialism. The reactionary side that there's this insane fraud that seems to have taken place in Minnesota that a lot of people are saying is just the tip of the iceberg. Is this going to end up becoming the pivot year or two years where politics is really going to end up being where this plays out and where America decides what this next evolution is going to look like?

Yeah, I think so. I think Dr. Drew would always come to me and he would say, You know what's coming around the corner. You're the guy. You're the prognosticator. You're the Indian with his ear down to the ground. Who knows which way the wagons are coming. He would say to me, What's next? What's next? I said to him, this is about eight years ago, maybe 10 years ago, and I said, I don't know. And he said, No, you know. Think about it. I said, All right, what's next is going to be safe spaces and octagons. And he said, What does that mean? I said, All the people that tired of living in a nanny state, being told, We're going to get rid of your internal combustion engine and replace it with an electric car, and all that stuff, they're going to self-segregate. They're going to move to Florida, they're going to move to Texas, they're going to move to Tennessee. Then all the safe space people are going to end up in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles, and stuff. Eventually, the safe space places are going to fall apart, and the Arctic octagons are going to thrive.

It was funny because I'd been saying this to him for years, and then several months ago, Trump announced he was putting an octagon on at the White House, and Drew started yelling. It's literally happening, the octagon people and the safe spaces people. Now, the safe spaces don't work. That's the clean needles and the no judgment injection zones. All that pie in the sky shit doesn't work at all. It'd be nice if it did work, but it doesn't work. The second you start handing out free food and free money for welfare, disability, it'll all get corrupted immediately. It's human nature. You know what human nature is? Dogs at the airport. I never saw a dog at the airport, ever. Then 15 years ago, I saw a dog at the airport. I said, What's that dog doing at the Well, that's a service dog. I said, Well, that's a poodle that's on a 20-foot leash. No, that's a serve. It's got to be dazzled collar. No, that's a service dog. I said, Okay, what happened? Somebody said, Look, we're on the honor system. You get a note from your doctor saying you need your service dog, you can travel with your dog for free.

Then 10 minutes went by and the airport looked like a kennel because people are weak and they will take advantage of whatever system that can take take advantage of. If you're going to start handing out money to daycare centers, they're going to catch on real fast, especially if they come from a place that's corrupt, where this is not really frowned upon, it's business.

Piracy is pretty They did a business over there. It's like they exported pirates.

Right. They should have sent them to Pittsburgh. But... Thank you. The point is, what do you think is going to happen when you take this culture, you put it in a place, and then you announced there's free money floating around, and there's not going to be a lot of checks and balances. Well, then this is going to happen. It couldn't go any other way, and it's going to happen everywhere.

Okay, so is your prognostication at this point, there's the old adage that hard times make hard people, hard people make easy times, easy times make soft people, and then soft people make hard times again. Right. Is the United United States going through this era where the easy times, the economic success, the growth of the economy, the extraordinary expansion of wealth in this country has now gotten to the point that it's broken. We've become, call it too soft and too oriented around safety over growth, around protectionism over expansionism, where all of this has basically led to a moment where we're effectively eroding all of the greatness that we've built many of the great systems that we've built or the great opportunity that existed in the United States is being now eroded away and we're going to enter hard times. Is that a fair estimation of the cycle? Or do you think it's geographic that Florida and Texas are different than California, New York, and Seattle, and Oregon?

Where are we? Yeah, I think it's all the above. Obviously, I think it's a regional thing because the people who want freedom and want to drive Ram pickup truck will move to Florida. You're going to get a lot of like-minded people. I can't tell you all the people that I've known in the last 5-10 years that have packed up and left. If somebody who's lived in California my whole life, I found it was interesting. One is living in California, you don't experience people who leave California. You only experience people who come in from somewhere else. It was always a novelty. Also, when you work in a writer's room, that guy's from Pittsburgh and that guy's from Chicago, you really know it during football season because they all come in and you go, Hey, The Rams are on this Sunday. You guys want to watch a Rams game? They go, I don't give a shit about the Rams. I'm a Steeler's guy. They're all cowboys. There'd be a room of 16 guys in LA, I'd be the only Rams fan because they all came from somewhere else. I mean, literally, Los Angeles has two or three Steeler's bars.

It doesn't have any Rams bar. So everyone was from somewhere else. Nobody ever left. The only time I ever heard of someone leaving California in the past is, Oh, their company relocated to Denver. They got to move out. Whatever. Now I talk to people and they're like, I'm leaving. And I go, Is your company relocating? No, I'm leaving. I go, Where are you going? And it used to be a thing where it's like, Well, I'm going to retire and go to Maui, or my folks died and they got a place in Montana or something. They just go, I don't know, Florida, Nashville, Texas, Austin. Anyone got here? Yeah. Well, that, someone should tell Gavin Newsom, I don't only have people leaving, but they're leaving going, I don't care. I'll go anywhere. I'm just leaving.

You think that there's one side of America that's going to continue to go the way it's going, and then there's the other side? Is the US going to find itself with to Americas? And what does that look like?

Well, it'll look good for... Look, Orange County is in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles. It's clean, it's safe, and it's normal. When something like COVID comes around, they're like, We're not shutting our beaches. Good luck. You know what I mean? I mean, there's literally a sign about halfway to Orange County from LA that basically says, Hey, criminals, don't try that crap here. We will prosecute you here in Orange County. And thus, Orange County is orderly, it's clean, and it's nice. What I'm saying is the safe space people are the free syringe people and the safe injects in site people and the open border people and the Somali daycare people, and we cannot judge, and our homeless, our unhoused neighbors, and so on and so forth, and their remedy for fixing school test scores is to get rid of test scores, they will fail because their system cannot work. The other side is diet and exercise. It's like, Oh, you want to lose weight? Diet and exercise. What about this dietary fudge? Not going to work. But my kid likes diet and fudge. Not going to work. Diet and exercise. But my kid doesn't like.

I know. No one likes it. Now get to work. They won't do that. Their whole thing is free busses and free needles and free everything and defund the police, and it'll collapse under its own weight. It already has. Then they're going to have to look to these other states and ask for help at a certain point.

Well, so Let me ask you this then to challenge the notion that two Americans can coexist. California is projected to have an $18 billion budget deficit in the '26 to '27 cycle. There are some estimates that say that the pension shortfall in California for public employees that have retired is 600 billion, maybe as high as a trillion dollars short of the legal obligations of payments that need to be made to those retirees coming up in the years ahead. That money has to come from somewhere. The United States is $40 trillion in debt. We're burning one and a half trillion, maybe two trillion a year. Debt costs are climbing. This becomes a spiraling problem. Because all of these regions, all of these pockets that may think and act differently, share a common balance sheet, share a common government, and have to share the fiscal responsibility together, how does this resolve? Because one side might say, Hey, I want to balance my budget here in Texas. The California side says, Hey, I'm going to burn all this money and make all these promises I can't keep. But at some point, they can't all go separate ways. They all share the federal balance sheet.

The federal balance sheet is being used to bail out states left and right and bail out for states' lack of preparedness and provide services when states aren't stepping in to provide services and so on and so forth. Doesn't this all come to a head because of the fiscal issues that we're facing?

Yeah. I'm speaking less... Well, first off, I'm speaking about the next 25 years versus the next 125 years. I'm also speaking more socially than I am in a, We're going to have two armies. Is Florida's army going to do battle with California's army? I'm not that far into it. I'm basically saying the people in Los Angeles who want a nicer place to live just move to Orange County. They just go, I don't want to raise my kids in Los Angeles. The school system sucks. I'll go, I know plenty of people who went, I don't want to leave California, so I'll go to Orange County so my kids can have a good school system. So they're just going to relocate. I think the people who are a little more- Businesses, too, Adam. I mean, a lot of...

Washington's got this new payroll tax for employees making over $125,000. They want to charge a 15% payroll Now Amazon, Microsoft, Costco have all spoken about leaving the state, but that obviously creates a huge hole in those budgets.

Yeah, and Tesla and SpaceX and all things Elon Musk going to Texas and all that stuff. There's going to be that migration. Eventually, they're going to get to the deficit and unions and payrolls and retirement funds and things like that. Then we're going to have to have another conversation. But But I'm saying the first part of this is going to be the physical relocation of businesses and of families to places that are more hospitable for them. Listen, Gavin Newsom can say He's going to say anything he wants, but people understand what a shitty school is and what a good school is, and they're going to move to a place that has a good school if they have young kids. That'll be that. We can talk coastline and we can talk about mountains and skiing at noon and swimming in the ocean at 4: 00 in the afternoon. We can talk all about that, but people are going to self-segregate and they're going to move, and it's on, and that's what's happening. So that's going to be the first part. The second part, when we start getting into weird martial law and the military and stuff like that, that will be dead by then.

Okay, so we got a while.

Yeah, that's what I I see a lot of people that are ultra high net worth moving out of California right now and considering moving their companies right now because of this new Billionaire Tax Act.

I don't know if you followed this, but there's a proposal right from this guy, Dave Regan, who's the head of the SEIU, to do a one-time 5% tax on anyone's networth over a billion dollars. He's gathering signatures right now, and he's doing it as a direct ballot measure. So you in California can propose an amendment to the Constitution as a ballot measure, and you get 800,000 signatures, and it ends up on the ballot. Seems like it'll be pretty popular. People will vote for it. And now there's this thing called the Oligarch Tax Act in Congress to take 8% of the networth of people over 50 million. But it seems like they're already coming down the ladder where they're saying, Hey, the governments, in order to fund all of these social programs and the expenses, are going to start to take private assets. How does that affect this migration? Because it seems like as the people leave, as the money leaves, they're not going to cut spending. They're going to look for other ways to grab money. Does that just drive the migration up?

Yes, it's definitely going to drive migration up. They never really understand that, which I'm always interested in. Then also in the wake of the Mali, Minnesota thing and whatever the corruption they're going to find in California, which they've already found, and God knows how it's going to dwarf the Minnesota situation when they do get to the bottom of that. It's a tough sell to in the middle of all your fraudulent waste explaining we need more money from the workers, basically the people that are the builders and the creators and the workers. So obviously, look, there's two ways you can go about... The utility bill is too high in our house. You could say to your wife, Well, you should close close the windows at night and not walk around in your underpants and not run the furnace at 90 degrees all day. Then she could look at you and go, or you could take a second job and we could just pay the bills. You go, All right. Well, and they're both true. I mean, either California could rein in some of its insane spending or they could just get more money to take care of those obligations.

They're both true, and actually, percentages of both would work. You could cut spending 10% and you could get 10% more tax revenue, and that would work. It's not like Rokana is mathematically wrong. He is creating a problem, which is you guys can't just keep looking at people as piggy banks, especially the ones that are creating the jobs and creating the industry, you need to start looking at ways to rein in your spending. I think it's a fundamental flaw in general with Democrats, which is, let's just look around for whoever has the most money and see how much we can get. People of California, the people in the highest tax brackets, they're already at about 50% 53 with state and federal. You can look at them for more. But A, I think it's... In terms of When they go, Oh, Trump's a dictator, and this is tyrannical, and these are oligarchs, and whatever, they can say whatever they want, but taking more than 50% of your money, I would argue it's the ultimate government overreach. No one ever thinks of it that way. They think in terms of wearing masks or shutting schools or getting Jimmy Kimmel fired from his job or something.

But the government putting their hand in your pocket all day, every day, and wanting all the wealth tax and the estate tax and the expiration tax and all that stuff, it's insane. And yes, it will drive people away from wherever entity is doing that?

The thing I worry about is that it's very hard to cut spending on the flip side, Adam. By my estimate, more than half of Americans rely on a government check, either directly or indirectly. So you're either employed by the federal state or local government or its agencies or one of its contractors, or you're receiving one of the retirement checks from a government agency. It's become very difficult because a majority of the population is receiving benefit or living from some government flow of capital, which makes it very hard from a democracy perspective to say, Hey, I'm going to vote to change that. Who would vote to cut their own income?

You take the retirement age. You go, Look, Social Security is not going to be able to keep up with this. Why don't we make the retirement age 70? Then everyone goes out of their minds. I'm like, Look, people live 20 years longer than they used to. You look at RFK Jr. Over there. He's doing chin-ups. The guy's 71 years old. I mean, 70 ain't what it used to be. And by the way, I'm 61. I have no intention of retiring at 65. I know plenty of guys that are in their 60s. I talked to Dr. Drew and attorney Mark Garagos every other day. Those guys are nowhere near retiring, and they shouldn't retire, and we shouldn't want them to retire. So someone's got to go, Look, we're going to raise that age to 70. By the way, I don't know, Jane Fonda is She's at work right now, as much as I hate her work and her. But the point is, somebody's going to have to have some balls. I know it's not popular with all the people who are used to getting money from the government, but someone's got to have to be the adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity.

Who do you think is the right candidate for California? Have you looked at the slate? Who do you like? I guess, who do you think is probable?

We You cannot have business as usual. A business as usual is we are just bottoming out in some slow-motion train wreck here. The Swalwells, who, by the way, is a dope. A lot of these people are dopes. I don't think people really understand that. You can vehemently disagree with many folks on the other side of the aisle. You could disagree with Jim Jordan or Tom Cotton or someone like that, but they're not dopes. Eric Swal is a dope. Kamala Harris is a dope. Karen Bass is a dope. These are dumb people who shouldn't be in charge of things because they don't have the intellectual capacity for it. Now, I disagree with Barack Obama. I think he's a liar and a race hustler, but he's not a dope. Eric Swal is a dope. And so, first things first, I don't really want a dope. I don't want a dope governing. Now, Gavin Newsom is a sociopath, but he's not a dope, but there's something wrong with him, clearly wrong, and he doesn't think clearly, and he's not linear at all. I've interviewed him for an hour, and there's something wrong with him, but I don't lump him in the dope department.

I will take... Katie Porter is an idiot, and she's a dope. By the way, her being mean to her employees is the least of my worries. I have no thoughts about that. She's a dumb cow. I heard her statements about some advertising campaign that Chase Bank came out five years ago, and she's clearly an idiot. We don't want her. We don't want any business as usual. Steve Hilton, Larry Alder, Rick Caruso, it doesn't Anybody who is not a dope and can think like a business person and approach California that way, I'm in on. I don't know where Rick Caruso's, what his future is. I'm pretty friendly with him. I assume he's going to run, and he's great. Steve Hilton is great. Larry Alder is great. It's anybody from the right side will fix this. It cannot have a succession of more dopes and swalwells and guys like that.

Do you think the state can survive as a single-party state? I saw this statistic yesterday that I think 1,100 bills get signed into law a year out of the state assembly because it's a uniparty state. There's this extraordinary, some people would call it pillaging of the budget and pillaging of resources in California for personal interests that all get funneled through the state senate, state assembly process, and bill after bill after bill after bill just gets pumped and signed, versus having a more purple state where there could be a process where there's debate. Is there a to that in California, or is it too long lost where all the people that could make it a Purple State are leaving or have left? Can we get there?

Yeah. I think the fire woke some people up. I think all of a sudden people are sounding a little bit different. In a weird way, Hollywood is a bellwether. They take the temperature of the state by where Hollywood is. They were all very far to the left and very liberal and very woke. For the first time ever, you do hear people talking about not wanting to trans the kids. In the business, you know what I mean? Piping up. You have comedians and you have actors, and they're talking about, Why weren't those reservoirs filled? No, I'm not voting for Karen Bass, and she should have How do we let this place burn down? And by the way, what's up with all this production leaving to Atlanta and leaving to New Mexico? All of a sudden, the stuff has landed on their plate a little bit. Their house burned down, and they have to go out of the country to film their next sitcom. And they're like going, and there's a homeless guy pissing on their front porch, and their niece got stabbed by a homeless homeless guy just walking to school. There's these campers, these Winnebagoes everywhere dealing fentanyl in front of their house.

For the first time ever, they're going, I don't know, maybe this isn't the direct shit. It's true, a lot of them have left. But Hollywood is a little bit of a yardstick to measure the temperature of the town. For the first time ever, I am hearing those types comedians, and speaking out loud, not whispering anymore. You have to hide. If you had something bad to say about Karen Bass, you had to say it quietly. You couldn't send a tweet out and that stuff. There is an awakening, and it's what would logically happen if your house burned down.

Right. This guy named Rob Henderson, who writes about these things called luxury beliefs, right? Right, sure. It's a luxury to have a belief in doing X, Y, or Z until it shows up at your doorstep. It's the It's the fact that you don't have to deal with it, you don't have to live with it. But eventually, if it does affect you personally, then you realize, wait a second, maybe this is not the right decision. It's like turning off the natural gas so that people can't have stoves. Now, the poorest of people can't afford to cook their food because it's so expensive to use electricity to heat your food. The luxury belief is, Oh, it's better for the planet, but for the majority of people, it hurts them. Similarly, once the Winnebago show up and your niece gets stabbed, you realize maybe that the best policy or set of policies that I've been supporting for years.

Gas is six bucks a gallon, and you drive a gardening truck, and it's a Ford F-250 extended cab, and it's filled with 2,000 pounds worth of equipment, and you're getting seven miles to the gallon and you're on a gardener salary, yeah, you're going to think about cheaper gas. You're not thinking about the Coastal Commission at that point. You just want the price of gas to go down because you're driving a pickup truck filled with gardening material.

I work in Silicon Valley, and a lot of what Silicon Valley is on the receiving end of at this moment is this extraordinary anti-tech, anti-AI sentiment that seems to be brewing and bubbling on both sides of the aisle. Democrats, Republicans, for different reasons, are viewing the tech industry as this evil, the oligarchs, the new kleptocrats, and so on. From where you sit, where is this headed? Is this a pronounced issue from your view? I mean, maybe we're all very sensitive to it here in Silicon Valley, but is the generally anti-tech sentiment becoming louder, becoming more significant? How does this affect the next cycle in politics, do you think?

Well, I mean, we always need a villain. It's easy when it's World War II, we just hate Nazis. It's pretty straightforward. Then at a certain point, it gets a little more complex when it's Vietnam or something like that. Then at some point, it's Monsanto and these big chemical companies. We always need somebody to protect my constituency from. So elect me and I'll protect you and your kids from this company that's dumping raw sewage into the river and so on and so forth. Now that we've cycled through all that, I I do think big tech is the last, not the last, but I mean, the current bogeyman because we're not really dealing with big companies polluting anymore, and we're not at war with this nation or that nation. It's an easy target. There's some skeletons in the closet about kids and screen time and incentives to keep the kids on the screen and the damage that it may be causing the young kids who grew up staring at the screen and access to pornography and everything else, and then AI. Ai, that is the ultimate pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That's the evil lizard, and you let me, and I'm going to rein these people in, and I'm going to protect you from this potential harm.

Forget about you. What about your kids? You want them growing up in this hellscape of AI being chased down the by Elon Musk, robots. Also, anything America doesn't really fully understand makes it that much easier to pitch them and scare them. So, yeah, there's going to be that. Also with the billionaires and Bernie Sanders and the war on wealth and that stuff, that these guys making all this money with all their cronies and all that. So it's going to be a real easy target for them, and they'll go after whatever's an easy target. In the '80s, it was drug dealers. It was pretty straightforward. And it shifts. It goes Germans, and then it goes Vietnamese, and then it goes drug dealers. It'll just cartels. It'll just move around and switch to whatever's expedient for them. But I would say Silicon Valley, AI, AI and big tech is going to be the bogeyman of the future.

Do you think that there's a real fear of job loss and a real understanding or experience to date? I know a lot of people in Hollywood talk about the creative process getting replaced and they're getting written out of the system with AI. Does that feel real to people in Hollywood? How much have you looked at this broadly across other industries?

Well, I've always been a big advocate of the trades with my background, and I've always wanted kids and felt like we needed to have them get involved with the trades, and it always drove me nuts. In the late '90s, when they do all those campaigns about saving the music and save the music programs at school, and I'd be like, What about shop glass? Could someone save shop glass? I mean, for Christ's sake, Malibu is burnt to the ground. Palisades are burnt to the ground. Altadina is burnt to the ground. Do you know how many electricians and plumbers and framers and roofers and drywallers and sheetrockers and tin knockers we're going to need just here right now. You know what I mean? And by the way, these guys aren't making 14 bucks an hour. They're making 300 bucks a day on the low end. There's good money, and AI is not going to replace you in the near future. So I've been a huge micro, let's bring shop back. We need it fan for a long time. It's As far as AI goes, everything, technology just replaces things. Trucks replace wagons, and it just keeps going and going and going.

It's like, Well, should we We have the postal service? We have email. No. Then when your argument is, We're going to put a bunch of people out of work if we close the mill down that no one needs, I'd go, Put them out of work. We don't need it. That's life. That's the way it's going to go. You're artificially propping Putsing some industry up is not the way to go. People are going to have to start considering this when they're looking at a profession.

This is also an important principle that when technology creates leverage for a person in terms of how much they can create or do in an hour. It's not about replacing them. Then suddenly more will be done per hour by 10X or 100X. It's not like fewer miles are being driven today because we got cars and replaced all the horses and wagons. We're driving far more miles by a thousand X, 10,000 X. And there are all these new jobs and new industries that emerged around it, which I think is one of the fallacies on thinking about replacing old stuff. So just to wrap up, I mean, maybe looking ahead to '28, we talked a lot about things are headed longer term. Maybe how do you think the presidential election is going to play out in '28? How do you think things are going to go for the midterms?

I mean, I'm in the it's the economy stupid camp, although I'm not a Carville fan. But I think Trump's Implementing a lot of things. I think people asked him two days in, how come eggs weren't cheaper? Stuff takes a minute. Takes a minute to get the fuel prices down, takes a minute for tariff revenues and things like that. I think Trump's fiscal stuff is going to kick in in the new year, and I think people are going to start reaping the benefits of that. I think if that happens and gas is cheap and interest rates are and homeownership is up and employment is up, then we're going to have four more years of some JD Vance or some vert Trump 2. 0 in office. In terms of the In good terms, they may kick in before we feel the full effects of the positive economic products that Trump is implementing. So That could go either way. But I think in terms of the presidential election, I feel like if Trump's stuff works, like border closed, interest rates down, fuel cheap, foreign skirmishes either eliminated or drastically reduced, then yeah, someone will go, Let's see what four more years of this is like, versus whatever Kamala Harris word salad or insane trans, the illegal prisoner's policy or whatever.

I mean, whatever insanity Gavin Newsom wants to implement, although he'll have to walk all of it back. So that's always the fun part. But I like when people pretend like their ideas that they had in their 50s were now that... That's an idea I had when I was 54 and a half, but now that I'm 57, I I'm going to put my childish ways behind me and I'm a new person. It's like, no, if you're making those decisions in your 50s, it means that's what you thought. But yeah, it'll be interesting. If the economics kick in and the tariffs work and the gas comes down and the interest rates come down, then, yeah, I think it'll be four more years.

It's crazy. I never was interested in politics. I hate talking about it. I hate getting involved in it. Because for me, I've always just been a guy like, Leave me alone. Let me do my work. Let me live my life. I don't want to think about government and politics, but it's become so prevalent in our lives. It's become something that all of us almost are forced to discuss and forced to get involved in and forced to have an opinion on and a voice on and understand better because it's so prevalent. I've been listening to you for 30 plus years. Was this ever a thing that you spend time on? Because we just spent the last hour talking about frigging politics and this stuff.

No. I'm glad we're ending on this point, which is everybody I know who gets lumped into being a right winger, all they say is, I just want to be left alone. I just want to be left alone. I have a property. It's my property. I own it. I pay taxes on it. I would like to rebuild my property. The government says, No, you cannot. Now I have a problem, and it's getting political, but I don't want it to get political. I just want to be left alone. I got a niece, and she's five years old, I don't want a nine-foot-tall tranny reading her cat in the hat at the library. But this is avoidable. You can just leave her alone, and you can leave me alone, and I'll pay my taxes, and I'll be a good neighbor, and I'll pick up my dog's poop, and we could get on with our lives. But you won't have it. You have to get involved. Most of the people I know who are on my side of the aisle, in terms of politically and just emotionally, are going, I just want to be left alone. If I want a gas stove, I want a gas stove.

If I I want a gas-powered truck, I want a gas-powered truck, and I would like to be able to rebuild my property using my money to rebuild my property and then pay taxes on that without you getting so involved. I'd just like to be left alone.

I think you're almost like a bellwether for the fact that the country and the city and the state and other systems of governing have reached a breaking point because so many of us who have no interest in politics, never had any interest in it, never focused on it, never spent time on it, almost got wrangled into it because of all of the artifacts of what these systems have turned into, that they now touch every part of our life, disrupt our ability to live our life, to do our business, to do our things. We're constantly being prodded and poked in a way that feels really wrong. Look, Adam, I appreciate you spending the time today. This has been awesome. Great to meet. Yeah, thanks for being with us.

My pleasure. We'll do it again soon. All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion.

People love the interview. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely.

We crushed your questions.

We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What are you going to say? That was fun. That was great. Fun.

I'm doing all in.